Focused Momentum

JUNE 26, 2024

As a leader in a corporation, non-profit organization, or small business, you understand the importance of strategic planning. It's the roadmap that guides your entity towards its goals, aligning resources and efforts to achieve success. However, many strategic plans fall short because they overlook crucial elements. In this post, we'll explore six critical components that your strategic plan may be missing, potentially holding your organization back from reaching its full potential.

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Focused Momentum

MARCH 13, 2024

Multitasking is often a skill identified with a highly productive person, yet today our use of technology has pushed multitasking to ridiculous levels. As you know, it has gotten so bad that we’ve had to pass laws to do less of it, and now research indicates that rather than increasing productivity, it could be harming us. As an expert in strategy development for more than 20 years, I have had a front row seat to how this trend has impaired strategic thinking too.

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Focused Momentum

JUNE 24, 2021

Just as the last year presented unprecedented management challenges, post-pandemic strategy development conversations will face issues never experienced before. Here are three realities to consider as your organization prepares to re-engage in strategic planning. Greater demand for strategic direction. A strategic direction is a comprehensive story of how an organization will evolve as it strives towards its long-range vision.

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Focused Momentum

JUNE 4, 2021

Last weekend felt like the beginning of the beginning. Like many here in the US, my family celebrated the start of summer by joining two other families for a camping trip. We planned the trip this winter when Covid rates were soaring, and we were under Shelter in Place orders. We desperately needed to look forward to something. We knew the reservations might be canceled, but we forged ahead.

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Focused Momentum

MAY 10, 2021

These days there is a lot of planning going on.

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Focused Momentum

MARCH 22, 2021

Let me know if this rings true for you. You are in a conference room (or now in a virtual meeting) where a team member presents a slide of data in a teeny-tiny font. You think you have seen these slides before, yet your eyes strain to identify the piece of data the presenter is discussing. As you squint your eyes a little tighter, you wonder if there is a paper handout you missed that would help you keep track of the point she’s trying to make.

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

2020 challenged our tactical brilliance, but it was not the year to engage in strategic planning. So, as we begin 2021, many leadership groups wonder if they should re-engage their long-term planning efforts.

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

2020 was a horrible year. The massive changes and uncertainty destabilized everything, the least of which was our ‘planning and managing disciplines.’ As we enter our second year of this global pandemic, leaders are asking us, “It is time to get planning back on track?”. Last week I posted an article on this topic. In Time to Get Back-On-Track with Strategic Planning?

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

This year has been full of ups and downs for all of us. This roller coaster has taken a toll on long-range planning efforts, and rightly so. But, as we enter our second year of this pandemic, leadership folks have to wonder, are we there yet? Can we get back to our strategic planning?

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 13, 2021

If it is the start of a new year, it is goal setting time. If you are like most, you reviewed how well you performed against last year’s goals and then updated this year’s objectives with incremental adjustments and made a renewed commitment to keep them top of mind throughout the year. That the job done, right? Ah, no, at least not if you intended to set strategic goals for the new year.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 5, 2021

The start of a year provides an ideal opportunity to define new goals and set a new course for the coming year, and no year has been more anticipated than the start of 2021. Most of us believe 2021 will provide us a way out of this crushing pandemic and put us on a road to a new, safer, more stable future. Finally, we have the optimism to set goals for this new chapter in our lives!

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Focused Momentum

AUGUST 12, 2020

This article is part of our Strategic Thinking During a Pandemic series. Last week I was invited to participate in a panel on how to support the nonprofit sector through the pandemic. We have worked in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors since founding Focused Momentum in 1999, so I thought I had a reasonably good understanding of how to approach this topic.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 22, 2020

Welcome to our new conference room, playground, living room, gym, and oh yeah, COVID-veggie-garden. Like many of you, we have been struggling to figure out how to prevail during these stranger-than-strange times. Normally our business cycle has a consistent seasonality. The late winter and early spring is the time when we wrap up the strategic planning engagements launched in the prior year, and I concentrate on creating the content that we will build programs around for the next 12 - 18 months.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 13, 2020

Pandemic or not, businesses need to review plans for their next year. Leadership teams must think through how the world has changed and how they will respond to thrive and grow regardless. Teams must breakdown their goals and build collaborative plans to meet or exceed them. So, planning must proceed and, while w e are all rapidly becoming very well acquainted with the technology to connect virtually, we are missing the core techniques and tools that can transition a virtual meeting into a virtu

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Focused Momentum

JULY 8, 2020

Large group strategic planning meetings are typically conducted away from the office to foster an environment where folks engage with each other differently. Today, most of us are working remotely, and meetings are indeed "off-site" yet provide none of the benefits of the traditional off-site meeting.

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Focused Momentum

JUNE 25, 2020

Mid-year usually is the time to review progress against goals, and update your strategic thinking, given new changes to your plan assumptions. Is a mid-year check-in against plans relevant given the sweeping changes we are experiencing with this global pandemic? Yes, but we suggest a few changes to how you conduct a mid-year planning discussion to make it more relevant for these extraordinary times.

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Focused Momentum

MAY 5, 2020

My grandparents had twelve children. Like many of their friends and family members, they married and started their family in the early days of the Great Depression. They had a farm so they could feed their ever-growing brood. They struggled, but so did everyone else. They worked hard and eventually thrived. Later they watched uncles, brothers, and cousins leave their Pennsylvania farmland to travel across the globe as part of the US deployment in WWII.

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Focused Momentum

MARCH 10, 2020

I have a good friend just about to retire. In a text exchange over the last week, I inquired " Still set for the move? " His response. " Yes, the movers are scheduled, and I plan to give notice at the end of this month, only I look at my investment portfolio daily. Maybe I should wait.". For sure, now is a hard time to make a significant change like the one my friend is making, but should he reverse course and delay his retirement?

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Plans are set, goals are defined, budgets are negotiated, and a new year begins. Teams review their goals, their budget, and go right back to focusing on what their priorities were last year. Sound familiar? How does a management team ensure that their folks focus on making progress on the longer-term objectives while they manage ongoing operations?

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Focused Momentum

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Thinking is very trendy these days. There are multiple articles promoting design thinking, the value of systems thinking and the need for greater strategic thinking skills, but are these all the same thing? No, not really.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 29, 2020

“What are the greatest challenges you face?”. This was the question I posed to stimulate a brainstorming exercise during a recent Strategic Thinking Workshop. “Too many goals. We have too many goals put upon us.” Said one soft-spoken participant. Heads of the other participants nodded in agreement. “And it is assumed we can deal with it.” Said another woman around the table.

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Focused Momentum

JANUARY 7, 2020

This last year was an ambitious year for Focused Momentum ®. We celebrated our 20th year in business. We expanded our content and programs and also worked with a bunch of new folks on their strategic plans. Yet, as the year drew to a close, I felt defeated. I wanted to do so much more! I scheduled a call with one of my most trusted advisers to talk about how the year went and what I was going to do differently in 2020.

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Focused Momentum

JULY 30, 2019

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and pretty soon you have a dozen." -- John Steinbeck. I like rabbits and I love ideas, but too many of either and you have a problem. Managers consistently struggle with how to encourage innovation. In the last two posts, I discussed renewing strategic thinking months before budgeting as another discipline of strategic management.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 9, 2019

Raise your hand if you were alive on November 22, 1963. I recently posed this question to a conference room of 30 senior executives and board members. We were in the opening section of a jam-packed strategic planning session, and this organization had a challenge faced by many today: How to engage more diversity in their thinking. This was not a new challenge for this organization.

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Focused Momentum

DECEMBER 2, 2019

As the fiscal year ends, the planning teams wrap up the annual planning and distribute next year’s budgets. Ideally, this would be a time of excitement as each new year brings new challenges and new opportunities. Unfortunately, more times than not, new budgets are met with disappointment rather than excitement. Disappointment because rarely do teams get all of the resources they requested, and reviewing the new budget dampens the excited to launch into a new year.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

“ It just sucks. Every year we try to make improvements, and it gets better, but it still sucks.”. This is a sentiment expressed by the CEO of a successful and fast-growth technology company on a conference panel last month. The other panelists, also CEOs and senior executives of growing companies, nodded agreement. What was the focus of their shared disdain?

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Creating a winning strategic plan is awesome. You feel great, your team is motivated, and you see renewed passion and commitment to shared success.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

“ It just sucks. Every year we try to make improvements, and it gets better, but it still sucks.”. A sentiment expressed by the CEO of a successful and fast-growth technology company on a conference panel last month. The other panelist, also CEOs and senior executives of growing companies, nodded agreement. What was the focus of their shared disdain?

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 15, 2019

In the recent Harvard Business Review article, Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business , authors Michael Harris and Bill Tayler explore this question by taking a close look at how Wells Fargo’s strategy development and plan execution may have been a factor in enabling the horrible sales practices that cost it billions and possibly permanently tarnished its brand.

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Focused Momentum

AUGUST 28, 2018

Strategy development is the most creative work leadership teams get to do together; rather it should be. All too often poorly facilitated planning efforts become chaotic or worse, boring. Strategic thinking should be the most fun a leadership team has together, but without the right guidance, it can be viewed as mundane. Learn three ways to create real enthusiasm for your next planning effort.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

At times, we all must make tough choices in the present to prepare for long-term success. All too often we delay acting to change the status quo possibly hoping the issue it will resolve itself. When we take this “let’s just wait and see” course, we don’t protect anything, and we can put something very valuable at risk.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 17, 2018

“Gain a fresh perspective.”.

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Focused Momentum

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

For those with a fiscal calendar starting in January, the autumn months will be dominated by one thing: budgeting. By mid-September, the budget kick-off meeting has been booked, and negotiations have already begun on how next year’s assumptions need to change. This intense focus on the next year can be disorienting when much of the organization is still pressing hard to meet or exceed the current year’s goals.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 8, 2018

The relationship between strategy and positioning are both the result of strategic planning in which you first set the context within which you operate, and then define the ultimate position you want to achieve within this context. A strategy is your plan for how to move from where you are today, your current positioning, and where you ultimately want to be, your ideal strategic positioning.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 16, 2018

Strategic thinking capabilities are a huge asset to an organization. Finding good internal strategic thinkers and leveraging them in our planning projects significantly strengthens the strategic plan our clients adopt. Maybe you are just the stimulating thinker that is needed to produce your organization's next great plan.

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Focused Momentum

OCTOBER 25, 2018

Strategic planning participants often express the desire to be well prepared before the first group meeting. It is understandable that a dedicated and diligent new executive or up and coming leader might experience anxiety as they think about their first strategy discussion. After all, their boss will be in the room, all their peers and possibly a colleague or two with whom they don't see eye to eye.

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Focused Momentum

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Creating a winning strategic plan is awesome. You feel great, your team is motivated, and you see renewed passion and commitment to shared success.

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